[HN Gopher] Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash...
___________________________________________________________________
Punctuation Matters: How to use the en dash, em dash and hyphen
Author : MrVandemar
Score : 499 points
Date : 2023-03-12 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.punctuationmatters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.punctuationmatters.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It ... somewhat ... saddens me that HN's parser doesn't
| distinguish these as Markdown-based comment systems do:
|
| Hyphen: -
|
| En dash: --
|
| Em dash: ---
|
| On usage --- I find the practice of using the em-dash _without_
| bounding spaces (typical of most modern style-guides) is visually
| distracting and more difficult to read than when spaces are
| provided around the punctuation (as I 've done here, and my
| stylometric stalkers may file as a personal identification tell).
|
| And finally:
|
| - Hyphenated.
|
| - Non-hyphenated.
|
| There is no justice.
| [deleted]
| wruza wrote:
| Although that allows "hypenated-and-autological", which is very
| useful under some circumstances and in frontend.
| BrandonS113 wrote:
| It is easy to say this doesn't matter, and personally, I couldn't
| care less which is used. However, professionally, I have twice in
| the past two months had a deal with text that was edited by line
| editor for my organisation, where they strongly criticised our
| use of these punctuation markers.
|
| And, after much cursing, and my team spending time changing the
| text, I reflected, and came to like those punctuation markers.
| Took me a long time, but I have been converted.
| dathinab wrote:
| Does anyone still care for the en-dash today outside of very
| formal literature?
|
| It seems to be quasi dead and anyway often indistinguishable if
| not written side by side with a hyphen. Furthermore I would argue
| that if the meaning of your sentence is ambiguous if a hyphen
| instead of an en-dash is used you should reformulated it.
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| Punctuation matters in publishing. In comments however, errors
| become style.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Can we at least get all the people making "no one" into one word
| ("noone", which drives me crazy) to hyphenate it?
|
| Or does no-one care but me?
| euroderf wrote:
| Powergen Italia, anyone ?
| spruengli wrote:
| [dead]
| loevborg wrote:
| Literally noone
| bdg wrote:
| I'm just going to leave this here for you
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/firstable
| layer8 wrote:
| For a long time, I thought there is actually a word "noone"
| pronounced with an "oo" sound like "noon". You know, like no
| one says "whom" anymore but you still see it written.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Is there a similar article that we can get to chide people that
| use the double dot ellipsis (..)? It's not a thing, but I see it
| everywhere from casual conversation to business's websites. I
| despise it.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, you often don't know if it's meant to be an ellipsis or
| just a typo for a single dot.
| handsclean wrote:
| Oh man, I didn't know other people did this, I invented it in
| my friend group. Never in proper writing, only texting. To me
| it conveys a tone that other punctuation can't replicate. For
| example:
|
| Ok.. - Ok, but I'm unsure about this
|
| Ok - Ok
|
| Ok... - Ok, but I'm sad or resigned about this, and I want you
| to address that
|
| Ok. - Ok, and that's final
|
| Ok? - I don't know why you're saying this, explain yourself
|
| Ok...? - I don't know where you're going with this, explain
| yourself
|
| Even writing "Ok, but I'm unsure about this" isn't the same,
| because that calls more attention to your hesitation. If you
| don't use "..", your only alternative is to spend a minute
| basically doing translation work between inflected English and
| monotone English, maybe arriving at something like "Ok, I'll
| try", or more likely just give up and communicate in lower
| fidelity.
| FrontierPsych wrote:
| I've always known about the three, but the author is correct
| saying it's about availability. You used to have to go into the
| "special character" pop up, click on the n- or m-dash, go back to
| the document and paste it in. In more formal documents, _maybe_ I
| 'd do that, but most of the time it is just a big pain in the
| ass, and most people don't know the difference, so why bother. I
| do use the space dash space now for the n-dash. But where is the
| m-dash??? Usually under the "Special Characters" option I went
| into Tools menu to check if Special Characters is there...nope.
| Format menu choice?? Nope. Insert? Ah! There it is...after having
| to look through each of the above very slowly to see if the
| Special Character option is there. Now I have to look at the
| characters - there used to be very few special characters and you
| could find the m-dash. Now there are thousands of special
| characters and I don't have the time to look through them all. So
| now I have to go to the help documentation to search for the
| m-dash.
|
| OK, on in the help search box, nothing comes up under "m dash,"
| "m-dash," "em-dash," or "em dash." Not even showing up under
| "dash." Fuck. OK, so now I have to go the ASCII table to find the
| ASCII decimal code. I found it - it is ASCII code for m-dash is
| 151, but how do I put that in the document??? I search online
| help - no help.
|
| I go back to the Special Characters option under (Insert menu.
| OH! There's a search box on top. I type in "m dash" THERE IT IS!!
|
| So I had to go through all that, just to find the m-dash. Why?
| Sheesh, what a nosebleed. You might say, "Of course, why didn't
| you do that in the first place?" Because 1) I'm an imperfect
| being, and 2) I've used all of those other ways before - I didn't
| start on computers in the last 5 years, I've gone through a lot
| of changes so I know a lot of ways to do the same thing. And from
| app to app, some still work one way way, some not.
|
| I didn't do my old standby, though. That would have been my next
| step -- just go to Google search, type in m-dash as I'll always
| find it there, then just copy and paste the m-dash. That almost
| always works. Why didn't I do that first just now? Because I just
| wanted do it within the word processor, because that's the way it
| "should" be. And _eventually_ was, after much work.
|
| So, fuck all the special characters. I just use commonly
| understood equivalents if I can.
|
| But, the point is that _I 've_ always know the difference between
| all three, it's just -- why even bother? It's a colossal pain in
| the ass.
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| > What do they look like?
|
| > - hyphen
|
| Hmm, that hyphen looks a bit long... $ unicode
| - U+2013 EN DASH UTF-8: e2 80 93 UTF-16BE: 2013
| Decimal: – Octal: \020023 - Category: Pd
| (Punctuation, Dash); East Asian width: A (ambiguous)
| Unicode block: 2000..206F; General Punctuation Bidi: ON
| (Other Neutrals)
|
| <p style="voice-family: 'The Senate'"> Ironic.
| strogonoff wrote:
| For a somewhat more advanced (and IMHO much more beautifully
| typeset) but still succinct overview of em dash (and some other
| dashes) in practical use, see https://twos.dev/dashes.html.
|
| Suitable for those who are familiar with punctuation basics but
| may want a refresher, and AFAICT gets some things more correctly
| (e.g., the numbers in a range are generally separated by a figure
| dash, not en dash).
| johnbellone wrote:
| A site that pulls on my heart strings.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| This is now pretty much nonsense, because of technology every
| dash is a hypen.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Which one of these, then, is for minus?
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| Hyphen. You'll also hear it called "hyphen-minus"
| teddyh wrote:
| "Hyphen-minus" is an ASCII abomination, and should only be
| used in ASCII-constrained environments. Hyphen is hyphen and
| minus is minus:
|
| - 002010;HYPHEN;Pd;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;;
|
| - 002212;MINUS SIGN;Sm;0;ES;;;;;N;;;;;
| Aardwolf wrote:
| The issue of non-ASCII-constrained environments is that
| it's still not easily accessible on most keyboards.
|
| I do know and use the compose key but it's not the same as
| having a standard key for it. Trying on a mobile device,
| long pressing the dash key there suggests 2 dashes (not
| sure if the second choice is en-dash or em-dash), which is
| some but that's not the 4 types discussed here.
| teddyh wrote:
| If a character is too difficult to type on some specific
| system, that is indeed a constrained environment.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I was wondering what's better. The document is clearer if
| we use unicode.
|
| But maybe for humans it's easier if we have a limited
| character set and use context instead. Like this.
|
| In plain text, - is a hyphen: twenty-
| five, -1
|
| In math context - is a minus sign $
| (-1)^3 + x^3 $
|
| Where it will be ensured to be rendered as appropriate
| kzrdude wrote:
| Good/bad news: It should be U+2212 MINUS SIGN like this: -1,
| which is none of the others. It looks better than hyphen: -1,
| doesn't it?
|
| Matplotlib example:
| https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/text_labels_and_annota...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Personally I've always preferred a minus sign closer, like
| the latter. While the subtraction operator looks better as
| the former. But I think this is just a calculator-ism that
| has infected my math syntax.
|
| But especially for matrix inversion, the super wide
| subtraction symbol just looks awful to me. A little
| calculator style minus symbol is also nice because it'll
| clear the matrix more easily...
| [deleted]
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has brought up the excessive waste of energy
| that has occurred when m-dashes have been misused when the
| correct character should have been an hyphen or an n-dash. Those
| additional pixels have no doubt contributed to kilograms of
| mankind's carbon footprint.
|
| /s
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not to mention the extra key strokes required to type an em
| dash! They have surely accelerated the onset of people's carpal
| tunnel syndrome by as much as a couple of minutes.
|
| Will no one think of the wrists?!
| askvictor wrote:
| Next up: why three periods for an ellipsis is bad and you should
| feel bad for doing it.
| pepa65 wrote:
| No, what's bad is having those 3 periods squashed into the
| space of 1 character..!
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| That's only the case for monospaced fonts.
| ehsankia wrote:
| So basically, N Dash is a rich man's hyphen and M Dash is a rich
| man's comma?
| mNovak wrote:
| My opinion on this matter is entirely driven by the fact that I
| got used to easy '--' and '---' en/em dashes in LaTex. So now
| when I use Word, I added autocorrection triggers for '--' and
| '_-' to the same effect.
|
| But, it makes this whole em dash-filled thread very confusing to
| read as everyone (from my viewpoint) is using en dashes (--)
| where em dashes belong!
| calibas wrote:
| It's even more complicated as there's an additional near-
| identical character in Unicode. Copied from Wikipedia:
| - is a hyphen-minus (ASCII 2D, Unicode 002D), normally used as a
| hyphen, or in math expressions as a minus sign - is an en
| dash (Unicode 2013). -- is an em dash (Unicode 2014).
| - is a minus (Unicode 2212).
| layer8 wrote:
| It doesn't help that you wrote it as a monospaced block. ;)
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I also avoid em dash for being too big and prefer just using en
| dash when I would have used it
| masswerk wrote:
| Another job for the en-dash: association
|
| E.g. in names, "Initech - Infinite Tech Company"
|
| (We may even argue that ranges or dates are a special case of
| this, as we associate two or more particles in order to form a
| broader concept.)
| larrymcp wrote:
| Ironically on a punctuation blog, it looks like he has a
| punctuation typo in his title. In the headline, the semi-colon
| after "hyphen" should actually be a colon. So the corrected
| headline is "En dash, em dash and hyphen: what's the difference?"
|
| A colon is used in this context, when you're introducing the
| question that follows.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The article misses the rather important piece of trivia about
| technology compromises that what it has been calling "hyphen" is
| actually U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, rather than U+2010 HYPHEN. The
| situation there is a real mess: HYPHEN-MINUS is ugly in many
| fonts due to compromising between the ideal appearances of a
| hyphen and a minus sign, and HYPHEN is often missing from the
| font, leading to falling back to a hyphen from a different font
| rather than HYPHEN-MINUS from the same font (which is clearly
| more desirable, but technically unappealing).
|
| A comment led to the follow-up
| https://www.punctuationmatters.com/the-difference-between-a-...,
| but it's still very insufficient, only dealing with MINUS SIGN
| and assuming HYPHEN-MINUS was exclusively a hyphen. And appears
| to have suffered from the same replacement of lone HYPHEN-MINUS
| with EN DASH as this article.
| cheschire wrote:
| I get why you wrote those words in all caps but it still feels
| like you're yelling emphatically about nothing, and that
| coincidentally sums up how I feel about the rest of this topic.
| jurimasa wrote:
| Thats so myopically HN... "I don't care about it, so it's
| probably not important and dumb anyway lol"
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| And to the one expressing that thought, you're right. To
| them, it's not important, and dumb.
|
| You could argue, however, that they should refrain from
| posting, but they probably felt the need to share in case
| others felt the same way.
| Kronen wrote:
| What about I don't care that you don't care?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| It's also very likely to be hypocritical: how many topics
| on HN are tuned towards a very specific kind of
| focus/nerdom? And what's the point of commenting "aha, good
| for me that I don't care aboutt this!...?
|
| I guess the difference here is that someone's boss might
| complain that they should follow this article, since we all
| write stuff from time to time.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Agreed it's very HN. But it's not just bad. Hackers are
| usually hard-wired to reduce entropy--we're quick to point
| out when something is redundant or unnecessarily ambiguous.
| Formalia is also used for gatekeeping, which the HN
| Zeitgeist doesn't like.
|
| That said, personally I need my different dashes, commas
| and parentheses for my excessive wavering.
| starkd wrote:
| Made it 54 years without ever hearing about mdash/ndash/hyphen
| distinction. I've just been using the hyphen character for
| everything. Must have been absent that day in grade school.
| [deleted]
| tromp wrote:
| This reminds me of one of Weird Al's better songs
|
| "Word Crimes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
| ofalkaed wrote:
| This guide and most guides like it tend to miss the most
| important and powerful use of the em-dash and make it out like
| you can use it for anything but really they are just missing the
| wonderful simplicity of the em-dash and how versatile that
| simplicity is. The em-dash raises and lowers the narrative voice.
| In fiction this provides a way to provide insight into the
| narrator; an em-dash tells us we are switching from the story the
| narrator is telling us to the thoughts of the narrator, a second
| em-dash or a period lowers the voice back down to the story the
| narrator is conveying. This is the sense of dialog being
| introduced with em-dashes instead of being quoted, a new line
| starting with an em-dash lowers the narrative voice, narrator
| hands story off to character.
|
| The simplified rules for the em-dash are pretty much intuited and
| prescribed versions of this which gut the effectiveness of em-
| dash. In general use an em-dash should be used to denote thoughts
| without having too restructure/delete what you just wrote to
| accommodate that thought.
|
| Edit: I oversimplified. Consistency is what is important, using
| an em-dash like a comma that isn't a comma leads to ambiguity
| when you also use commas. A writer who avoids semicolons and
| quotes all dialog can use an em-dash very differently than
| raising the voice, but they can also use a semi-colon very
| differently than its standard accepted role, that is what these
| simple guides miss, the consistency of usage, they just list all
| of the various ways you could use any given mark and people start
| using an em-dash to "fix" their long run-on sentence with all of
| its commas.
|
| The closest thing we have to standard use allows for wonderfully
| complex sentences which can convey great meaning but consistent
| and well defined use is most important.
|
| comma - connects independent and dependent clauses
|
| em-dash - raises and lowers the voice
|
| semicolon - connects independent clauses in a more direct way
| than the paragraph
|
| colon - elaborates an idea
|
| parenthesis - an aside, stated instead of thought
|
| period - end of thought
|
| Question mark and exclamation points do not need to be at the end
| of a sentence, they can double as comma, semicolon, or colon.
|
| I seem to be missing a nuance of HN's line breaks and formatting.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've never heard that perspective before about raising the
| voice, but I really like it.
|
| What's even more interesting to me is that this contrasts with
| a parenthetical which I now realize _lowers_ the voice when we
| read it aloud.
|
| Did you discover that difference on your own or did you read it
| somewhere? Just curious.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is how I read them.
|
| My mental model is that an em-dash is a parentheses that author
| was too excited to slow down and make vertical.
| jameshart wrote:
| Reasonable choices. And a good description of a specific use
| for the em dash. But I think it's a poor mind that can only
| conceive of a single use for a punctuation mark.
|
| We could also use em dashes to signal excitedly running from
| one thought to the next--as if we're just riffing on an idea--
| too fast to be interrupted--wouldn't that be amazing?
|
| Or we can use the em dash to slow us down--to pause and reflect
| on what we just said.
|
| Or in dialog:
|
| "Perhaps we can use it to signal an unexpected inter--"
|
| "-rogation?"
|
| "No, an interruption."
|
| "Yes, that would make more sense."
|
| "Oh! I just thought of something--we could also use it to
| indicate stunned silence."
|
| "--"
|
| "Exactly."
| mrits wrote:
| I think I'd like to fork the language and write one with sane
| guidelines.
| atuladhar wrote:
| The problem is that the real world, human thoughts and other
| things that language needs to try to express are not "sane."
| So if we are to have a common basis for communication, the
| guidelines will tend to get "insane."
| arketyp wrote:
| Do you have a reference for this? Never heard that particular
| framing about the narrative voice before. You call it a
| versatile simplicity, but to me it sounds rather restrictive
| and specific, to be honest.
| [deleted]
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I gave I look through my books and English is wonderfully
| ambivalent when it comes to punctuation outside of
| prescriptive grammars. The descriptive grammars largely (if
| not completely) ignore punctuation and focus on spoken
| language, even the Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English
| Language reduces punctuation "rules" to a single page and
| reduces hyphen/en/em-dash to a typographical convention and
| does not say much more than the dash is often used in
| informal writing to replace other punctuation marks. All we
| really have here is convention and consistency, can you meet
| the challenge I outlined without following the conventions I
| laid out? It can be done but it will be considerably more
| verbose than it would be following those conventions which is
| not a bad thing. Authors like McCarthy, Krasznahorkai,
| Ellman, Bernhard have all built their style around breaking
| those conventions (yes, two are translations when it comes to
| English but they break the conventions in their own languages
| as well.) Even Joyce breaks the convention and he does it
| within single works, switches between adherence and breaking,
| but not many have pulled that off in the way he did.
|
| It is a really complex thing and part of what makes English
| literature what it is. We have conventions which have evolved
| over time when it comes to punctuation and we have
| prescription, but we don't really have rules unless you are
| writing tech documents or journal submissions. It comes down
| to having a clear and consistent use more than anything else
| and using every punctuation mark for any accepted use based
| on whim is not clear or consistent.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Search engines seem to really fail here, they are just giving
| me more guides like the one here, I can not get them to give
| me anything about narrative voice beyond conflations of
| narrative voice and tone. You can see this use in a great
| deal of literature which uses the em-dash to introduce dialog
| in place of quotes, I believe Becket would apply but it has
| been years since I have read him so can not say for certain.
| Most of the authors known for their long complex sentences
| follow the conventions I outlined in my edit even if they do
| not use the em-dash for dialog.
|
| >sounds rather restrictive and specific, to be honest.
|
| Write a single sentence which clearly and concisely includes
| exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question, self
| rebuttal and conclusion without following the "standard" I
| included in my edit. This is what allows writers like James,
| Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon, etc to write their
| wonderfully long and complex sentences and by complex I am
| referring too meaning as much as structure, we can have great
| meaning with simple structures but we have to accept a
| certain amount of ambiguity with that. Sure that challenge
| can be executed as a paragraph but then it ceases being a
| single thought, it is a collection of thoughts and that is a
| very different thing.
| jameshart wrote:
| If you'll indulge me, I actually think your final paragraph
| could be copyedited to illustrate all of your suggested
| 'standard' rules -- though in your own rendering you only
| used commas and periods.
|
| > Write a single sentence, which clearly and concisely
| includes exposition, thought, aside, rhetorical question,
| self rebuttal and conclusion, without following the
| "standard" I included in my edit: This is what allows
| writers (like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon,
| etc) to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences
| (and by complex I am referring to meaning as much as
| structure); we can have great meaning with simple
| structures, but we have to accept a certain amount of
| ambiguity with that--sure, that challenge can be executed
| as a paragraph, but then it ceases being a single thought;
| it is a collection of thoughts, and that is a very
| different thing.
|
| I tried to stick to your 'standard', though you might
| disagree on some of my choices. I would say I found it a
| little constraining. Here's an alternative edit that
| doesn't follow your rules but - I find - creates a more
| fluid reading of your original words:
|
| > Write a single sentence, which clearly and concisely
| includes: exposition; thought; aside; rhetorical question;
| self rebuttal; and conclusion - without following the
| "standard" I included in my edit. This is what allows
| writers like James, Joyce, Gass, Gaddis, Wallace, Pynchon,
| etc, to write their wonderfully long and complex sentences
| --and by complex I am referring to meaning, as much as
| structure. We can have great meaning with simple structures
| - but we have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity with
| that. Sure, that challenge can be executed as a paragraph;
| but then it ceases being a single thought--it is a
| collection of thoughts, and that is a very different thing.
|
| All of which I hope goes to show that these choices are a
| matter of taste, not absolute rules
| blueridge wrote:
| Great editorial reference: https://www.holloway.com/g/editorial-
| style
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Semicolons; forever!
| mfsch wrote:
| One distinction that I had missed for a long time is that the en-
| dash is used instead of the hyphen to connect words in the "and"
| sense, such as "read-eval-print loop" or "Myers-Briggs
| personality type". I find that the en-dash makes it a bit more
| clear that the words are sort of "on equal footing" and it's not
| one word modifying the other one.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Awesome. I've been using em-dashes ever since I've been able to
| type them (and sometimes before with things like — in
| Markdown/HTML-supporting contexts). PowerToys Quick Accent
| finally added en- and em-dashes, and I've enjoyed being able to
| type them anywhere without having to sacrifice my clipboard.
| eslaught wrote:
| Since we're here, what kind of dash do you use for dates?
| 2023-03-12
|
| I've tried to be more dash-correct, but I've realized there are
| corner cases that none of these guides address.
| layer8 wrote:
| ISO 8601 specifies to use a hyphen. In freeform text this also
| makes sense in that you could use an en-dash to specify a date
| range: 2023-03-12-2023-04-10. (ISO 8601 uses slashes for time
| intervals.)
| more_corn wrote:
| Dear Notion, Stop turning my double dashes into mdashes. My shell
| doesn't consider them interchangeable.
| vidarh wrote:
| I can't get myself to care. I've written two novels, and hundreds
| of thousands of words of articles and internal documents, and I
| can't for the life of me remember the rules for this, and neither
| can most other people. For my novels, my editor fixed it, because
| there are the odd pedant that cares and leave negative reviews of
| these things are not "right". For everything else I just use
| hyphens. It does not matter - it is clear from context.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > For my novels, my editor fixed it, because there are the odd
| pedant that cares and leave negative reviews of these things
| are not "right".
|
| Which means it is important. At least important enough to be
| worth spending money on and expect return (editors don't work
| for free).
|
| Maybe not for articles and internal documents, and even less
| for HN comments, but there are circumstances where it is, like
| in novels.
| vidarh wrote:
| I'd get exactly zero discoint if I told my editor to ignore
| dashes. It's not where their time goes.
| RobLach wrote:
| Basically never use en dashes or em dashes because they are no
| longer colloquial.
| nayuki wrote:
| Minus wasn't mentioned in the article, but the distinction
| between hyphen-minus (U+2D) and minus sign (U+2212) is very
| important.
|
| When you put plus and minus side by side (+-) such as in a
| financial context, the two horizontal lines should be in the same
| vertical position and both characters should have the same width.
| Whereas plus and hyphen-minus (+-) will have the hyphen-minus
| narrower and higher/lower.
| spruengli wrote:
| [dead]
| krupan wrote:
| I promise you, differentiating these three absolutely does not
| matter
| joegahona wrote:
| En dashes are ugly bastards that have very little benefit. Word
| and Google Docs inaccurately convert hyphens into en dashes, and
| I never have gotten a satisfactory answer why. I used to see en
| dashes to connect a compound modifier to yet another word, like
| "billiard-ball-size hail" (that's an en dash between "ball" and
| "size"), but I could never trace this "rule" to any style guide.
| Another popular case was a proper noun connected to another word,
| like "New York-based author."
|
| Computers require contortions to create em and en dashes
| (especially on PCs), so they've mostly gotten ditched. The choice
| of spaces or no spaces around an em dash created with two hyphens
| is largely stylistic, but I see spaces far more often than the
| closed-up version. (Oddly, in books and magazines it's opposite,
| at least in the U.S.; the closed-up version of the "true" em dash
| is more prevalent.)
|
| Hyphens and hyphenation rules really do deserve more attention,
| in my opinion. I was an editor in the publishing world before
| moving to tech 15 years ago, and a lot of the hyphenation could
| get really stupid in that universe. E.g., nobody's going to
| misread "ice cream cone," but some copy editors will insist on
| "ice-cream cone." Same with "credit-card bill." But there are
| lots of very technical documents I edit now that scream out for
| clarification, and the humble hyphen has been a godsend in making
| this painfully boring and headache-inducing matter easier to
| read.
|
| Also, I'm on mobile so can't verify, but it looks like the author
| is using an en dash throughout his post when an em dash is called
| for.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Word and Google Docs inaccurately convert hyphens into en
| dashes
|
| In Word's case, and I think GDocs as well, it is a switchable
| autocorrect setting, that mostly (not perfectly, because you
| can't do it purely structurally without semantic analysis) does
| it correctly, not inaccurately, AFAICT.
|
| > En dashes are ugly bastards that have very little benefit.
| Word and Google Docs inaccurately convert hyphens into en
| dashes, and I never have gotten a satisfactory answer why. I
| used to see en dashes to connect a compound modifier to yet
| another word, like "billiard-ball-size hail" (that's an en dash
| between "ball" and "size"), but I could never trace this "rule"
| to any style guide.
|
| I'm fairly sure that the Chicago Manual specifies this rule (my
| older Chicago Manual isn't handy, and the non-exhaustive
| information in the public FAQ [0] doesn't cover it, though it
| does address the closely-related rule on using an en-dash to
| connect a modifier to an open compound.)
|
| > Another popular case was a proper noun connected to another
| word, like "New York-based author."
|
| I'm pretty sure that's not because New York is a proper noun,
| but because it is an open compound.
|
| > Computers require contortions to create em and en dashes
|
| They require a tiny bit of setup to make it easy, outside of
| the applications which already make it easy.
|
| > Also, I'm on mobile so can't verify, but it looks like the
| author is using an en dash throughout his post when an em dash
| is called for.
|
| Some style guides call for an en-dash (usually, set open) in
| the places where the more common rule is to use an em-dash
| (usually, set closed.)
|
| [0]
| https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
| sirodoht wrote:
| Another resource on the matter, which I really like overall:
|
| https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html
| FpUser wrote:
| >"How to use en dash, em dush ..."
|
| How about stop fucking with people's brains. Hyphen - with spaces
| when needed - works just fine. I personally prefer round brackets
| ( have no idea if it is "legal" though ).
|
| I understand it matters in publishing but then leave it to them
| to make things pretty.
| bobse wrote:
| It's like a minus sign (-) but for "special" people?
| layer8 wrote:
| A typographically correct minus sign is "-", not "-".
| glacials wrote:
| For a little more on these with a focus on CSS and practical
| issues, I wrote an article a couple years back called Advanced
| Dashes: https://twos.dev/dashes.html
| esperent wrote:
| Everyone complaining about pedantry here, while I'm thinking this
| doesn't go nearly far enough. I'd like to propose that all
| punctuation marks should come in minutely different sizes with
| different meanings, not just the various dashes.
|
| Take the full stop. There should be a second version that's about
| .25 pts larger and means an emphatic full stop (not to be
| confused with a bold full stop, of course. That would be dumb).
| But why stop there? Let's add another one that's raised a tiny
| fraction from the baseline. About 0.1 pts should do it. This one
| should mean a shorter pause, somewhere between a full stop and a
| comma.
|
| And anyone who can't discern the difference, such as dyslexics
| and the short sighted, should be publicly whipped and forced to
| wear a hat off shame for a week. The hats, of course, being very
| slightly different shades of grey depending on which incorrect
| punctuation mark they used.
| boffinism wrote:
| (These rules apply to American English, not British English. I
| can't speak for other languages and variants.)
| meling wrote:
| This advice is not only important for the visuals. Ignoring this
| advice also results in weird pauses for people that use screen
| readers.
| jll29 wrote:
| Things are easy in LaTeX:
|
| -
|
| --
|
| ---
|
| Common mistake: use -- not - for ranges of page numbers in *.bib
| files!
| Voklen wrote:
| I do often wonder whether we should maintain traditional
| typography when moving to a digital age because punctuation
| evolves as language does. If we've deemed it unnecessary to have
| seperate symbols for each of the dashes and everyone uses
| language that way then that's fine. We can also ask this question
| about smart quotes, you'll notice I've been using the U+2019 as
| the apostrophe here and I could "quote" like this. It's a
| question of how much ambiguity it causes, how easy it is to
| input, and how subjectively aesthetically pleasing it is.
|
| My personal opinion for hyphens is:
|
| - Ambiguity: most can be cleared up with spaces, and for examples
| like 3-8 if it's numbers we can tell it's a range from context
|
| - Ease of input: one character is a lot easier to decide between
| than 3 (or 4 if you include minus), and if there are rules for
| software to be able to input the correct character every time
| then the differences in characters become redundant
|
| - Subjective aesthetics: I quite like the consistent compactness
| of the single hyphen
|
| And for quotes:
|
| - Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite
| nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that are
| not critical to meaning and simply make it easier
|
| - Ease of input: Usually automated but can absolutely tear
| through code if pasted in the wrong place. If we deem these smart
| quotes useful enough then they can coexist with typewriter quotes
| peacefully if we do not run the quote formatting on code blocks
| (which is where code should be anyway)
|
| - Subjective aesthetics: I do like the look of smart quotes but
| would be willing to use straight quotes
| xeonmc wrote:
| What about using tilde for numeric ranges?
|
| "The global conflict spanning the years 1939~1945 is known as
| World War 2..."
| Voklen wrote:
| Ohh yes, reducing the amount of tasks the hyphen is used for
| helps as well
| scbrg wrote:
| Tilde is already used for approximation though.
|
| The sentence as you wrote it _could_ be misinterpreted as
| "the conflict spanning the years 1939 to _ca._ 1945... ".
|
| Had you used a dash/hyphen/minus/whatever nobody would be
| likely to misinterpret that as "the conflict spanning the
| years minus six..."
| teddyh wrote:
| No, [?] is used for approximation, ~ is just the most
| similar ASCII character, and it became ingrained by people
| used to using old computers. Just like * is not a
| multiplication sign, but x is.
| c22 wrote:
| At this point I actually handwrite an asterisk to denote
| multiplication. If I think about it I know it's "wrong",
| but I do it anyways.
| latexr wrote:
| In other words, tilde _is_ used for approximation just
| like the asterisk is used for multiplication and
| "literally" is used figuratively. We can argue over those
| uses being correct or incorrect, but they are used like
| that.
|
| Thus I agree that using tilde for numeric ranges would be
| confusing. Might as well just use a hyphen, which is
| easier to type and most people won't notice the
| difference from the correct character (en-dash).
| teddyh wrote:
| > _but they are used like that._
|
| Using that form of reasoning, it could be claimed that,
| say, "espresso" is pronounced "expresso", because some
| people _do_ pronounce it like that.
|
| But that would be disingenuous, since "is pronounced"
| does not generally mean "is sometimes, by some people,
| pronounced", but "is _supposed_ to be pronounced" or "is
| _properly_ pronounced". The same goes for "tilde is used
| for approximation"; no it isn't. If would be different if
| scbrg had written "tilde is _sometimes_ used for
| approximation"; it would have indicated a possible
| interpretation of the first meaning, and not the second.
| [deleted]
| scbrg wrote:
| > If would be different if scbrg had written "tilde is
| sometimes used for approximation";
|
| Oh, dear lord. I apologize for leaving out this very
| important word. I thought it was fairly clear that I
| didn't mean it was the only symbol used for
| approximation, pretty much like how, I don't know...
| _nothing_ is the _only_ thing used for _anything_.
|
| Whatever phrase, symbol, word or tool in general you
| find, you can be fairly certain that there's _something
| else_ that could be used instead.
|
| In the really real world, people tend to use the symbols
| that are easy to type with their keyboards. Ironically,
| this is a bit like what TFA complains about; people
| always use the hyphen that's available with one keystroke
| when in fact they "should" (for some arbitrary value of
| "should") use a handful of different ones. And they use
| tilde for approximation, because nobody knows how to type
| a fucking [?]. You'll also note that they use " when they
| "should" have used ", " or any of the umpteen other
| variants of quotation marks.
|
| When it comes to _ambiguity_ , which was what this sub
| thread was about, _how things are often used_ is actually
| quite important. Because, you know, it 's what people
| _actually write_ that you have to disambiguate, not what
| they _should have written_.
| teddyh wrote:
| OK, fair enough. I was recently on the other side of that
| same argument here on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34940715
| addisonl wrote:
| No, they were right--languages change and a single tilde
| (~) definitely means approximately:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde
|
| Most people associate a double tilde with "approximately
| equal".
| Izkata wrote:
| The asterisk is an approximation of dot, not a
| replacement for x. They just mean the same thing on
| scalars.
| teddyh wrote:
| Using x or [?] for multiplication is, IIUC, a cultural
| differentiator - just like English uses . as a decimal
| separator, but many Europeans use , for the same purpose.
| But in Unicode, x is "MULTIPLICATION SIGN" and [?] is
| "BULLET OPERATOR", and * is more visually similar to x
| than [?], so I assume that's where it originates.
| mrspuratic wrote:
| ?But which tilde? I'm a fan of typographical abuse of the ~
| swung dash myself.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The pragmatic thing is to stay glued to the typewriter and then
| escape our nested strings with Unix toothpicks everywhere.
|
| > Ambiguity: They show when quotes start and end which is quite
| nice and we can have nested quotes. But these are things that
| are not critical to meaning and simply make it easier
|
| Typographic conventions go further than that.
|
| In Norwegian it's `<<>>` for one level of nesting. For nested
| quotes you are supposed to use something else. Maybe `''`
| (single quotes) for the second level and then `""` (American
| English double quotes).
|
| Maybe American English uses `""` and then `''`.
|
| In my opinion that's not necessary. At least for text storage.
| derbOac wrote:
| Part of my complaint about that is that although I think the
| different punctuation marks are great, using them is a pain
| because of keyboard layouts.
|
| It's easy to find a hyphen (or something close enough) on your
| physical keyboard, but there's no em dash. OSes also make it a
| pain to automate even when they claim otherwise.
|
| I go out of my way to use em dashes but do I think others
| would? No way. So is lack of use because of lack of utility or
| because of idiosyncrasies in keyboards?
|
| Hyphens are great for some things but are too short to visually
| offset text.
| kps wrote:
| The Mac layouts handle the dashes well in my opinion (quotes
| not so much). Option+'-' is '-' (en dash), Option+Shift+'-'
| is '--' (em dash). Option is equivalent to AltGr in the
| Windows PC world.
| yunruse wrote:
| I seem to have taken a weird personal style of using dashes in
| the context that an en dash is used for a splitting clause - like
| this - whereas an em dash is used only before a finishing clause
| -- like this.
|
| Curious to see if there are any uses for steganography with this
| (or just identifying people by writing style).
| lapama wrote:
| The M dash is now forbidden in several scientific journals, they
| think the N dash plays the same role.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| The lack of capitalization (even on HN) is a regression far worse
| than dash mis-use.
| gizajob wrote:
| One of the main things I learned about writing during my
| philosophy degree...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The em dash: that character that teaches you you can't use 7-bit
| ascii anymore.
| ilyt wrote:
| Sooo many broken CLI commands because of wordpress (and few other
| equally broken tools) replacing -- with retarded dash
| automatically
| swyx wrote:
| in 180 characters:
| https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1344127570753646593
|
| A guide to the 3 dashes in English:
|
| Hyphens (-) are compound-words.
|
| En dashes ([?] -) connect beginning-ending.
|
| Em dashes ([?]|-) can replace parentheses and colons -- use them
| more!
| perihelions wrote:
| Or in Linux,
|
| En dash (-): Compose - - .
|
| Em dash (--): Compose - - -
|
| https://tstarling.com/stuff/ComposeKeys.html
|
| https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...
| teddyh wrote:
| Also on Windows: http://wincompose.info/
| politelemon wrote:
| Of the three major OSes, Linux has the most intuitive way of
| producing special characters with its compose keys
| otherme123 wrote:
| To my surprise, no spaces around mdash is the general
| recommendation.
| greenicon wrote:
| The alternative is usually en-dash with spaces.
| gk1 wrote:
| Moving through text using Cmd + Left/Right arrow will jump
| over two words if there's an em dash between them with no
| spaces. As a frequent em dash user that was very annoying, so
| I switched to adding spaces -- to hell with the APA.
| brycewray wrote:
| True; depends on the style guide, but most opt in that
| direction. The Chicago Manual of Style is _very_ firmly in
| favor of it.
| FabHK wrote:
| It's more a matter of continent than style (ie, the former
| can explain most of the variance).
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > [?]|-
|
| What is this
| FabHK wrote:
| macOS shortcuts. Option-Shift-minus
| tekkk wrote:
| If you have three lines that practically look the same, they
| should be the same character. Otherwise, interesting read!
| chrismorgan wrote:
| They are only mildly similar in appearance, and they have
| wildly different uses and purposes, all attested for hundreds
| of years. Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea.
| ASCII unified these and more for technical reasons, and it
| meant that nuance or correctness was occasionally lost, people
| doubled and/or tripled the character to make dashes, and the
| results were just plain ugly.
|
| Look, even that HYPHEN-MINUS unification that ASCII foisted on
| us is problematic without considering dashes, because HYPHEN
| and MINUS SIGN were often fairly different in appearance, and
| _still_ should normally be at least somewhat different, even
| after a few decades of misuse due to the bad unification. A
| hyphen is much shorter, typically lower-placed, and in serif
| fonts often slanted (the left end lower than the right),
| whereas the minus sign is the horizontal half of a plus sign.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is
| entirely natural. Back when I was in school ~25 years ago, in
| newly-non-communist Romania where ASCII was at best a distant
| idea, no one taught any difference between these signs. We
| did have different names for the minus sign and the dash used
| in writing (and Romanian uses _a lot_ of dashes), but that 's
| it.
|
| We were taught to use the exact same sign for compound words,
| for other Romanian orthography, for separating words at the
| end of a line, and as one option for introducing
| parenthetical clauses - like this. And it was the same sign
| we used for minus in math class. A slightly longer dash was
| often used for one particular purpose*, though even that was
| not explicitly stated, and you wouldn't get lower marks even
| in calligraphy classes for using shorter dashes instead.
|
| * Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing lines
| of dialogue, especially in literature, as in:
|
| -- I would like to go to the mall.
|
| -- That sounds wonderful!
| Symbiote wrote:
| > The unification of minus, hyphen, en-dash and em-dash is
| entirely natural.
|
| Maybe in Romanian, I can't comment on that.
|
| In English, we have three different words in common usage:
| hyphen, dash and minus.
|
| No-one - including school-children - would write no--one or
| school--children. You might get -1 for that.
| starkparker wrote:
| The typographical distinction between a minus, minus-
| hyphen, hyphen, and en-dash can still be helpful to screen
| reader software:
| https://www.csun.edu/it/news/accessibility-tip-dashes-and-
| hy..., https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-
| and-conve...
|
| Some screen readers are better at parsing this than others,
| but if there's a typographical option that's more specific,
| it's typically appreciated.
|
| On the other side of it, the suggestion in the article to
| use dashes for numeric ranges isn't ideal for parsing.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > * Romanian uses these longer dashes when representing
| lines of dialogue, especially in literature, as in:
|
| I've seen that in English literature. Jeff Noon's _Needle
| in the Groove_ uses that style IIRC.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Unification would very obviously be a terrible idea
|
| Why? In the entirety of my school education I never heard a
| mention that different kinds of dashes exist at all and I
| still have no idea what their individual purposes are, yet it
| never had any impact on my understanding of text. Maybe I'm
| overlooking something, but if people have no problems with
| reading/writing despite "decades of misuse due to the bad
| unification", then it's not so obvious to me how unification
| is such a bad idea.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| A good resource for those of us who like TeX and LaTeX:
| https://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/latex.html
| ajl666 wrote:
| [dead]
| yakubin wrote:
| In Polish em dash is supposed to be surrounded with spaces. I got
| that rule ingrained in my subconscious so heavily that I feel
| very uneasy looking at em dashes without spaces even in English.
| Same way if someone didn't put a space after a full stop. So I've
| decided to go the British way and use en dash surrounded with
| spaces. And, after doing that, em dash really feels way too long.
| :)
| IncRnd wrote:
| This is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus. Honestly, I
| don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in
| business or personal writing, and I probably never will. They add
| nothing to anyone's communications.
|
| Perhaps, typesetting still uses these, but that's okay. They can
| keep doing so, since these probably add aesthetic appeal to how
| flyers are designed.
|
| I also noticed a pundit-battle brewing in the depths of the
| hyphen-m&ndash-soup.
|
| The article: Let's make that even more clear.
| THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH IS
| AS WIDE AS AN M.
|
| Yet, from another dash-hyphen pundit... [1] En
| and em dashes aren't called that because they're as wide as
| a lowercase "n" and a lowercase "m." They're called that
| because those are the specific typography jargon words that
| refer to the height of a physical piece of type (the "em,"
| also called the "mutton" to reduce confusion) and half that
| height (the "en," also called the "nut"). An em dash was
| originally as wide as the font is tall.
|
| [1] https://leffcommunications.com/2021/03/10/a-brief-history-
| of...
| throwingrocks wrote:
| [flagged]
| IncRnd wrote:
| I'm against ped:antic-pun-ctu,ation)) not against pretty,
| practical and productive punctuation.
| ivanstegic wrote:
| For someone who can quote Shakespeare [1] in a comment at the
| right time, you "...doth protest too much, methinks."
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086851
| IncRnd wrote:
| Ah, I am cut to the quick. In truth, one must sometimes be
| cruel to be kind. To one such as I, neither the hyphen nor
| the dash are a dish fit for the gods. In tragic travesty,
| it's all Greek to me. All that glitters isn't gold! [1]
|
| [1] a bunch of Shakespeare's sayings scraped together, after
| they were trampled in a mosh pit.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > This is way too much pedantry and hyper-hyphen-focus.
| Honestly, I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never
| seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never
| will. They add nothing to anyone's communications.
|
| You have definitely _seen them_. All professional writing
| outlets, like e.g. the New York Times, use em-dashes, curly
| quotes, and other "typographic" characters that one is supposed
| to use in American English.
|
| And newspapers in my own country follow the typographical
| rules. Even though no one uses it in informal communication on
| HN or FB. (Well, some on HN do.)
| IncRnd wrote:
| Except, I didn't write I hadn't seen them. "I've never seen
| them in business or personal writing".
|
| We can discuss that I chose the word "seen", when I meant
| "noticed", but there is no doubt that I didn't write what you
| intimated. I have seen the dashes in formal writing and in
| newspapers.
|
| A too-hurried reading is worse than not reading at all.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Oh. So "business" does not encompass "professional
| writing". Good to know.
|
| And also not "formal writing".
|
| And presumably no copy-pasted message from Word or whatever
| other app inserts "smart"-whatever automatically.
|
| And also not any regular old business website. (Did you
| think newspapers were the only ones? Just because those
| were the _examples_?)
|
| Even for _personal_ writing: some people even take the time
| to insert bullet points, so "proper" punctuation is easy
| for them.
|
| You're a fine one to complain about pedantry. (I guess
| yours is a just-right level of (cover your ass) pedantry.)
| IncRnd wrote:
| I was pointing out that I don't see them in my day to day
| activities.
|
| You've added exactly nothing to this discussion, just
| written a personal attack founded on misunderstanding and
| make-believe.
| raldi wrote:
| > I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them
| in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.
|
| There's an en dash in the first line of text on apple.com right
| now. There are en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens in the most
| recent press release on that site, all used correctly.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| obsessing about mundane details like that provides certain
| kinds of people with a mild feeling of control over their
| lives.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| With what kind of telepathy did you uncover this fact?
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| introspection and observation.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I
| probably never will.
|
| En dash is all over the place in personal/business writing,
| even just in email, thanks to Word and Outlook autocorrecting a
| hyphen to an en dash whenever it's between two spaces
| (rightfully in my opinion). If you've never seen it then that
| surely says more about what you notice than the content of what
| you've read.
|
| That doesn't necessarily contradict your point - if you never
| notice the distinction then what's the point? But it's
| different from how I read the implication of your post.
|
| (Funnily enough, without thinking, I put an en dash in the
| paragraph above by holding down on hyphen in the Android
| keyboard, and only caught myself after I did it.)
| atuladhar wrote:
| > if you never notice the distinction then what's the point?
|
| Given there is usage of en dash in the wild as you mentioned,
| there's a possibility this may be a case of "you don't know
| what you got 'til it's gone."
| IncRnd wrote:
| >If you've never seen it then that surely says more about
| what you notice than the content of what you've read.
|
| I'll agree with this. It also brings up the point, if
| punctuation isn't seen - is it useful? Probably not to me -
| maybe yes to others.
| chownie wrote:
| You might not be able to pick out the bassline in many of
| your favorite songs but that doesn't mean you wouldn't miss
| it were it not there.
|
| ---
|
| "Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are a kind of magic;
| their purpose is to be invisible. If the sleight of hands
| works, we will not notice a comma or a quotation mark but
| will translate each instantly into a pause or an awareness
| of voice [...] When the mechanics are incorrectly used, the
| trick is revealed and the magic fails; the reader's focus
| is shifted from the story to its surface."
|
| - Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative
| Craft
| IncRnd wrote:
| Thank you. It seems you misread the discussion.
|
| Following this thread, the discussion isn't about the
| existence or absence of punctuation. The discussion is
| about the case of three specific punctuation marks, which
| appear extremely similar if not identical. These
| punctuation marks are being discussed after reading an
| article about their differences, which are only apparent
| to those among us who find memorization more important
| than clarity.
|
| In this exact context, the question is whether all three
| punctuation marks are needed when literally none of them
| is distinctive enough as punctuation from the other two.
| If you read the comment to which I had replied, you will
| see them also make that point.
| chownie wrote:
| FYI this is a pretty condescending response to come back
| to. From the site guidelines:
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| Moving on from that.
|
| > In this exact context, the question is whether all
| three punctuation marks are needed when literally none of
| them is distinctive enough as punctuation from the other
| two. If you read the comment to which I had replied, you
| will see them also make that point.
|
| Indeed I did read it, I disagree.
|
| Going back to your original comment I don't think it's
| reasonable that you've never seen an em-dash in "business
| or personal writing" but I would totally accept that you
| haven't _noticed_ the punctuation in those contexts. This
| is partly my point, if these marks are used correctly
| then it makes sense you 've never spotted them.
|
| I'm saying that the people who read literature containing
| en and em dashes _would_ notice the difference were they
| not there. I 'd echo what another commenter said: these
| marks wouldn't be missed until they're gone but we would
| definitely miss them.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I wasn't expressing condescension but that you would have
| had a better understanding of what was being discussed
| after you would have read the thread. You should work at
| following the exact site guideline that you quoted,
| instead of making assumptions about my day-to-day
| communications and commenting about those non-existent
| communications.
|
| > Going back to your original comment I don't think it's
| reasonable that you've never seen an em-dash in "business
| or personal writing" but I would totally accept that you
| haven't noticed the punctuation in those contexts. This
| is partly my point, if these marks are used correctly
| then it makes sense you've never spotted them.
|
| What I was saying is that I don't see them in my day-to-
| day activities, which I don't. You are making assumptions
| about what type of communications I am involved with
| daily, and the types of people I communicate. I
| communicate with cryptographers and security
| professionals who all use mono-spaced text. I also
| communicate with C-level people who barely need to use
| punctuation other than a period. They have mastered
| brevity and communicate exceeding well.
|
| It would make far more sense if you wrote, "I don't think
| it's reasonable that chownie has never seen an em-dash in
| business or personal writing."
| duopixel wrote:
| Quoting Erik Spiekermann "Typography is like air. We only
| notice it when it's bad"
| Sprocklem wrote:
| IIRC, both of these are more or less true:
|
| > THE EN DASH IS ABOUT AS WIDE AS AN UPPERCASE N; THE EM DASH
| IS AS WIDE AS AN M.
|
| > They're called that because those are the specific typography
| jargon words that refer to the height of a physical piece of
| type (the "em," also called the "mutton" to reduce confusion)
| and half that height (the "en," also called the "nut").
|
| An em was traditionally the width of an uppercase M and an en
| half that (around the width of an uppercase N). Nowadays, this
| relationship doesn't necessarily hold: one em is equal to the
| font size (e.g., a 12 pt font has one em = 12 pt).
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Oh this is easy.
|
| m dash: --
|
| n dash: -.
|
| .. I take it few people find morse code puns funny anymore.
|
| Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry. What does having 3
| basically identical characters add to the language other than a
| pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over.
| We've all been using - just fine. On what basis does the person
| writing this article believe these rules matter, are important,
| disambiguate language?
|
| Call me a hopeless philistine, but I say down with the dash. One
| symbol is fine for word-compounding, numerical ranges,
| subtraction, mid word line breaks. No one needs an em dash to
| tell them pages 3-8 is not a compound word.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The em dash is syntactic sugar for a brief digression in
| discourse.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The article is not actually very pedantic - at one point, the
| author encourages us to break the rules - and I feel it has
| been offered in the sense of "printers have developed these
| variations on the basic dash, and if you choose to use them, it
| is probably best to use them in the same sense as printers
| themselves do."
| [deleted]
| virtualritz wrote:
| TLDR; Using the right dashes is about the UX of text. If you
| don't care about UX of the reader your points are sound.
|
| I however--as a typographer--strongly disagree. Typograpy is
| both about beautiful typesetting as well as making sure that
| the information contained in the text is understood easily.
|
| The former is obvious to me. It may not be to you but that
| doesn't make your reasoning right.
|
| As an analogy, there are quite a few people among my friends &
| acquaintances who cook occasionally or rarely. They usually
| share the trait that they care more about eating than how
| something tastes. Bluntly spoken.
|
| They commonly have one kind of oil in their kitchen (most often
| suflower) and they use it when the recipe demands "oil".
|
| Usually recipes specify what oil to use. It may say olive oil
| or peanut oil or sesame oil. They won't have these oils and
| they don't care.
|
| Even though the effect of using a different oil is profound on
| many levels (not even only taste). If you care, that is. Same
| with the dashes. Text looks and reads very different when those
| different dashes are used correctly.
|
| Which leads to the information part. Why do we have these
| different dashes? They actually map to spoken language.
|
| A hypen is used to pull things together. A word can be
| hypenated (should be read as if the hypen didn't exist) or two
| words can be pulled together (making the pause between them
| shorter) "ever-changing" is pronounced differently than "ever
| changing".
|
| An en dash used between points in time or space conveys that. A
| distance. The spoken pause is usually longer.
|
| And finally, an em dash, like a comma, conveys an even longer
| pause between the words it separates.
| frizlab wrote:
| An example from the article:
|
| Looks good: "Sometimes writing for money--rather than for art
| or pleasure--is really quite enjoyable."
|
| Unreadable: "Sometimes writing for money-rather than for art or
| pleasure-is really quite enjoyable."
|
| Yes, punctation does matter. (In French the em-dash is almost
| inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.)
| ehsankia wrote:
| Wouldn't the alternative rather be to use commas there, not a
| hyphen?
|
| "Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or
| pleasure, is really quite enjoyable."
|
| In your head, do you read those differently?
| jameshart wrote:
| Personally, I think this sentence would benefit from a
| comma before the 'or'. And in that case we could probably
| benefit from a clearer way of setting aside the
| parenthetical.
|
| "Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or
| pleasure, is really quite enjoyable."
|
| - this seems awkward to me. This version, though:
|
| "Sometimes writing for money--rather than for art, or
| pleasure--is really quite enjoyable."
|
| Isn't that more fluid?
| noizejoy wrote:
| > "Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or
| pleasure, is really quite enjoyable."
|
| I think that changes the meaning, since it's now a list
| of 3 items with an Oxford comma, rather than two lists,
| with the first list having 1 item, and the second list
| having 2 items. And I'm having a rough time even making
| sense of such revised meaning.
|
| Expressed as pseudo-code, I read the original intent of
| that sentence as:
|
| "money and not(art or pleasure) == enjoyable"
|
| and that can be broken into
|
| "((money and not art) or (money and not pleasure)) ==
| enjoyable
| askvictor wrote:
| I disagree that the first example looks good. Both cases
| would be better with spaces, which kind of renders the em
| dash unnecessary.
| ghaff wrote:
| Some places I write for use the em-dash with spaces and
| some without. I try to remember which is which but I often
| forget.
| biztos wrote:
| Looks better: "Sometimes writing for money -- rather than for
| art or pleasure -- is really quite enjoyable."
|
| Punctuation matters, but space -- the "zeroth punctuation
| mark" -- matters more!
|
| The author does discuss spacing the dashes but is, given the
| overall point of the article, surprisingly noncommittal.
| nephanth wrote:
| > In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use
| parenthesis instead usually.
|
| French uses em-dashes ("tiret cadratin") or en-dashes ("tiret
| semi-cadratin") for dialogue. Like so:
|
| - bonjour, dit-elle, comment allez vous?
|
| - bonsoir, repondit-on. Ca va ca vient, et vous?
|
| - bien
| miramba wrote:
| It's not unreadable, just a tad more difficult. And as others
| have pointed out, there are other ways of making it easier
| again than using a specific character. But the real point is:
| The information transported in both examples did not change
| its meaning and will be understood by the reader / receiver
| in both cases. If it's not, it matters. As long as it is,
| it's pedantic.
| 83457 wrote:
| I just use commas or parens.
| jameshart wrote:
| Having multiple options for how to offset parenthetical
| asides, far from being redundant (or even confusing),
| offers us--as writers _and_ readers--more opportunities to
| express the tonal variations (or nuances) that we would -
| in spoken language - communicate through our voice and body
| language; moreover it lets us vary the visual, aesthetic
| quality of our prose - which is as much a part of the
| experience of reading as comprehension is.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Is this a written excerpt from a text book or something?
| This single sentence makes more sense than many of the
| arguments I've seen previously.
| jameshart wrote:
| Nah, it's just a deliberate hodge-podge of a sentence
| where I threw in every subclause I could to try to
| illustrate the point.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| The "unreadable" sample is very much readable. We can all
| read it. No one is tripping up trying to figure out what a
| "money-rather" is.
| floodle wrote:
| Not for me. It's readable, but my brain has to do more
| work. When I get to "money-rather" my brain trips up
| slightly, and then I'm confused until the next dash, then I
| go back and figure it out.
|
| All possible and dealt with in under a second, but in the
| first example with the longer dash my brain recognises a
| parenthesis and I take a little "breath pause" before
| carrying on.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Also consider, that eye movement is not always linear
| from left to right. But I agree, brain has to do more
| work and it is slightly confusing.
| OGWhales wrote:
| I can read it, but it definitely trips me up.
| seszett wrote:
| > _In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use
| parenthesis instead usually._
|
| The only French-speaking place I've seen em-dashes used in
| daily life was Quebec. For some (good) reason, it seems
| administration took a lot of care in using correct
| typography. My voting district for example was _Mercier-
| Hochelaga-Maisonneuve_ (the first dash being an en-dash, and
| the second one a hyphen) and I was always amazed at how all
| communication actually used these two different dashes.
|
| I can't imagine this level of care in French or Belgian
| official communication.
| lencastre wrote:
| Also in Portugal, just use parenthesis (like when you would
| insert an idea into a sentence) and it still reads fine.
| yardstick wrote:
| Just add spaces. Sorted.
|
| "Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or
| pleasure - is really quite enjoyable."
| IncRnd wrote:
| Since I am now a hyper-hyphen-partisan-pundit after reading
| that blog post - I'd like to comment on your hyper-
| hyphenated comment.
|
| > "Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or
| pleasure - is really quite enjoyable."
|
| To me this looks like a cryptic-case of the corrective
| comma.
|
| "Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or
| pleasure, is really quite enjoyable."
| eternalban wrote:
| "Sometimes writing for money - I have other aims besides
| art or pleasure - is really quite enjoyable."
| c22 wrote:
| The way I was taught, you use the comma for a brief aside
| --em dashes are used for a larger diversion (and
| parenthesis are for the most tenuous connections.)
|
| In other words a reader should be able to skip reading
| the contents of parenthesis with negligible impact on the
| context or meaning of the sentence. They should be able
| to skip reading the contents of em-dash-seperated text
| without changing the meaning of the sentence. And text
| between commas should be considered integral to the
| sentence, while secondary to the primary gist.
| IncRnd wrote:
| What you reference is that commas are used to set off
| non-restrictive clauses, where the meaning of the
| sentence is clear without the additional clause. Though,
| the non-restrictive clause provides additional
| description of a word in the main sentence.
|
| Such as:
|
| Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or
| pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.
|
| Other than that, many people have come up with many
| writing styles. We mostly seem to be able to understand
| each other, so we are "all good".
| ant6n wrote:
| Your first sentence should also use a comma rather than
| the wrong dash.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That's why I used the dash...
| gnull wrote:
| Em-dashes add a bit of a pause. And having them longer and
| taking a bit more of horizontal space makes it more
| intuitive. They also break a sentence into parts. Having
| them easily distinguishable helps navigate text and reduces
| overhead. Just like periods or paragraph breaks help you
| see parts of a text, or syntax highlighting helps you see
| lexemes in a program.
|
| Using just one dash for everything will be readable in a
| text message or comment. But not in a (complicated) book,
| because there the benefit of these small things gets
| multiplied by the scale of the book.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _They also break a sentence into parts._
|
| IMHO, this is the main determination on when I decide to
| use em-dashes: is the text between them an aside of some
| kind? An alternatives would be to use parentheses.
|
| Personally I do not find that " - " as the GP suggests
| enough of a visual cue as "--". And on macOS using
| different dashes is fairly straight-forward:
|
| * hyphen: the key next to zero, "-"
|
| * en-dash: alt/option-"-": -
|
| * em-dash: shift-alt/option-"-": --
|
| Some apps (e.g. Mail) auto-convert double-"-" into an em-
| dash as well.
| gnull wrote:
| Good to see OSX people thought about this.
|
| On Linux, one needs to enable Compose key (keyboard
| layout settings). After that, you get default sequences
| like --. and --- for en- and em-dashes.
| flint wrote:
| yup
| tines wrote:
| Spaces can cause word wrap that can leave a dash at the end
| or beginning of a line, which is not beautiful. A spaceless
| em dash doesn't have the wrapping issues while retaining
| legibility. You could argue that that's a problem with word
| wrap algorithms, not punctuation, but that situation is not
| going to change any time soon.
| Findecanor wrote:
| A common substitution for emdash is -- which are _two_
| hyphens with spaces around them.
|
| Personally, I think two hyphens also looks better than just
| one, and it conveys that you really intended it to mean
| emdash rather than hyphen.
| EGreg wrote:
| I have used two hyphens, but I appreciated text editors
| collapsed them into an (em-) dash.
|
| Hyphens are simply for connected-words while dashes are
| -- for better of worse -- to make asides.
| vitus wrote:
| > Personally, I think two hyphens also looks better than
| just one
|
| It's context-dependent. (Aside: you wouldn't write
| "context--dependent", which is the use case of the
| hyphen.)
|
| Ostensibly the en dash is primarily used for ranges,
| although that's a case where I'm inconsistent. I won't
| typically write "A - Z" or the technically correct "A-Z",
| as I think in that case I tend to write "A-Z", using a
| simple hyphen. I certainly won't write "A -- Z".
|
| The em dash is even wider--it's not typically mistaken
| for a hyphen.
| c22 wrote:
| Sometimes I write A->Z.
| computerfriend wrote:
| This is similar to how it's typeset in TeX as well: two
| for en, three for em.
| jameshart wrote:
| If you're going to do that, en dashes look nicer (as
| explained in the article):
|
| "Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or
| pleasure - is really quite enjoyable."
| sethammons wrote:
| Is this the yardstick from The Grid? If so, hope all is
| well :) (and if not, I also hope all is well)
| yardstick wrote:
| Sorry that's not me, but thanks for the well wishes and I
| hope all is well for you too!
| knert wrote:
| This is what I do. I don't see the problem here. I don't
| see the need to adopt additional characters.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a tradition from hand-set paper print which is now
| largely obsolete.
| greenicon wrote:
| In German that's the way it's done: en-dash with spaces,
| em-dashes (basically) don't exist.
| atoav wrote:
| I use em dashes with spaces in German (and English) all
| the time -- I just like it better and don't care about
| arbitrary rules and traditions.
| r2222 wrote:
| Yea em dash with spaces looks better to me too, I find
| that it's harder to read if the em dash is there without
| surrounding spaces. Looks too cramped, not separated
| enough.
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| I have never understood the classical rule of no spaces
| around em-dashes. If you're going to use fancy dashes at
| all, an em-dash represents a clear pause, a break in
| thought -- something more robust than a mere comma.
| Typesetting an em-dash sometimes literally touching the
| words on either side has the opposite effect, visually
| connecting those words rather than separating them, and
| unlike a lot of the typographical snobbery we sometimes
| engage in, that one is a well-known (at least to
| designers) effect of proximity. Personally I prefer a
| thin space rather than a full one in media where it's
| possible, purely for cosmetic reasons, but I'd rather
| have a normal space than none.
| FabHK wrote:
| However, it is the en-dash, properly, rather than the
| hyphen. I quite like that punctuation.
|
| Now, anyone typing random texts to a friend or a few need
| not care, but I think people that write in a professional
| capacity to more than a few people should know and care.
| masswerk wrote:
| Hum, a hyphen is still an entity of its own (it may be
| even a short, slanted dash in some fonts), then there's
| the en-dash for association (e.g. "ZDF - Zweites
| Deutsches Fernsehen"), and there's the "Gedankenstrich",
| which performs more like a separator. Three typographical
| entities to express three different concepts. (But
| there's a tendency of mixing the en-dash with spaces and
| the "Gedankenstrich", as the latter also comes with
| surrounding spaces, which may appear overly exaggerated
| in some fonts.)
| greenicon wrote:
| Sure. As far as I'm aware the Gedankenstrich is usually
| set as en-dash with spaces in German, though [1].
|
| 1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbgeviertstrich#Gedank
| enstri...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think that is not really true? There is the
| "Gedankenstrich" and one can see it in texts. Or do you
| mean, that it is so rare, that German language almost
| does not use it? I think that depends on the writer.
| greenicon wrote:
| Yes, and the Gedankenstrich is usually set as en-dash
| with spaces around, only rarely as em-dash. See https://d
| e.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbgeviertstrich#Gedankenstri...
| kimburgess wrote:
| En space, em space, three-per-em space, four-per-em space,
| six-per-em space, figure space, punctuation space, thin
| space, hair space, ideographic space, or Ogham space?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I have written and read text for decades without knowing
| the difference between those, so whatever space one gets
| when pressing the spacebar seems to do the job just fine.
| And if in doubt LaTeX etc will handle the rest well
| enough if I care about sub-pixel precision of some
| margins.
| dmm10 wrote:
| Others have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen
| instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the
| day- I learned to produce text like this.
|
| How I learned the Unreadable: "Sometimes writing for money
| -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable."
|
| To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of
| punctuating on a typewriter.
| ghaff wrote:
| I use em-dashes and parentheses somewhat differently but you
| can mostly substitute the latter for the former.
| dsego wrote:
| Right, the dash length seems more of an aesthetic choice,
| like a drop cap or something.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In several significant computer typography systems, the
| _notation_ for an en dash is a doubled hyphen (--), and for an
| em dash a tripled one (---). Notably LaTeX and Markdown (Pandoc
| flavoured: <https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html>).
| bee_rider wrote:
| In LaTeX I've been using \textemdash instead. I don't
| actually know why, just, usually these sort of longer names
| tend to have some niche edge case they handle better.
|
| em-dashes and parenthetical should be used sparingly so it
| isn't too annoying to do all the extra typing.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My preference is for spare markup where at all possible.
| Less typing, less mental overhead, clearer source text.
|
| If it's _necessary_ to be explicit for clarity and proper
| rendering, then sure. But otherwise, the less friction the
| better.
|
| After years of procrastinating in learning LaTeX (the Lion
| Book turned out to be a clear, delightful, and highly
| useful reference), one of the pleasant surprises was that
| paragraphs are simply denoted by two carriage returns.
| After years of hand-coding HTML where matching <p> and </p>
| tags (among many others) was a constant occupational
| hazard, this was just ... pleasing.
|
| Markdown has a similar philosophy, if a far more restricted
| set of capabilities. That set _is_ however sufficient for a
| tremendous number documents, and if it 's ultimately
| insufficient _still_ remains a useful way to get _started_
| with writing.
| teo_zero wrote:
| Probably you know this, but you don't actually need to
| close every <p> with a </p>.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| By the same logic you might as well say: "why are we even
| kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write
| >>irl<<."
|
| The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a
| subtle sense does have relevance for semantics -- but that's,
| imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as
| grammatically relevant as commas and. periods, for example.
|
| The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it
| preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-
| typographic balance:
|
| - A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually
| perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two
| words are one
|
| - In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context -- or
| interjecting another idea within a sentence -- doesn't slow the
| pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate
| it the same way as when linking words.
|
| - And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance
| when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a
| hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in
| either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces
| following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an
| entity that belongs together.
|
| That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a
| balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic
| complexity to annoy people. Otherwise we'd be taking about half
| and quarter em dashes and the likes.
| akho wrote:
| Your message is somehow undermined by your use of "--" in
| place of "--".
| c22 wrote:
| No it isn't--double-hypens are a great alternative to an em
| dash and are interpreted as such by many people and some
| software. GP's argument is for the grammatical
| _functionality_ of differentiating dashes, not the specific
| symbols used.
|
| That said, I don't use en dashes, if I want my numbers to
| line up I use a fixed-width font.
| akho wrote:
| I find it unlikely that the comment was typed on a
| typewriter, or sent over a teletype. Computers and phones
| make it easy to type em-dashes if you want to do that. No
| sub-par alternatives are needed.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| That's a reason not to use _figure_ dashes, which aren't
| the same thing as en-dashes.
| ilyt wrote:
| > No it isn't; double-hypens are a great alternative to
| an em dash and are interpreted as such by many people and
| some software. GP's argument is for the grammatical
| functionality of differentiating dashes, not the specific
| symbols used.
|
| Use ;
|
| Works just fine
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Use ;
|
| Comma, not semicolon, is the usual alternative to em-
| dashes for setting off asides, semicolons set off
| independent clauses.
| ghaff wrote:
| Semicolons are often better just replaced by periods. I
| sometimes use them but I've had at least one editor who
| refused to use them for news-oriented copy.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Not sure if a deliberate joke but those are two
| independent clauses so should've used a semicolon :-)
| (between "asides" and "semicolons")
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Thank you for the post. I still don't want to learn & spend
| mental energy on which of 3 different dashes to use, but now
| I do see why people would want to (and I think the reasoning
| is solid, even if I don't personally want to bother with it
| :) ).
|
| You started by talking about kerning fonts, which is a great
| analogy.
|
| Building on that - kerning is awesome because stuff looks
| better and I don't need to do anything for it to happen.
| Would it work to have my display system figure out which type
| of dash to use automatically?
|
| Like, a dash inside a word should be short (under the
| assumption that you're linking the words together) and dashes
| with whitespace around it should be longer (under the
| assumption that you're switching context/injecting an idea
| into a sentence).
| ilyt wrote:
| Never really cares about anything that you're saying about
| how the dashes _should_ work to imaginary group of people way
| into typography
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Then don't use them? As a reader, I certainly appreciate
| when people do. When writing documents or HTML I use them
| because it adds clarity. When typing on a web form, I'll
| usually use "--" because it's visually similar and much
| easier to type on a US keyboard. No one, pedants included,
| have ever tried to correct me on it.
|
| I also use capitalization and punctuation when I type while
| many people do not. It'd be great if they did, since it
| makes reading easier and takes almost no additional effort,
| but I'm not going to let it ruin my day. The parent comment
| is about why the distinction in dashes matters and has
| virtually nothing to do with typography enthusiasm, but
| rather reader comprehension. If you don't want to integrate
| that information into your life, great, but that's not
| really a refutation. For my part, I found it interesting.
| Even though I use em-dashes I learned more about how
| they're helpful. If you don't want to use them, I'm almost
| positive no one is ever going to correct you.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I know the correct usages but often avoid them as it doesn't
| confuse the reader, but can break copy/paste usage. I can get
| by with ASCII hyphen/dash and double-dash for em-dash. I
| particularly dislike autocorrection of punctuation into more
| pleasing forms (e.g. smart quotes/apostrophes). This is one
| reason I tend to do outlining in Github issues more often than
| G.Docs.
|
| Of course I'm mostly writing about computer/software topics and
| don't write for publications or a non-technical audience.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Depending on the audience, I think the article is justified and
| gives a good overview. Just thinking of scientific papers,
| where sometimes you spend a full year carefully laying out the
| words. Being concise here helps improve legibility and is
| definitly worth the effort.
| ghaff wrote:
| Arguably there's a place for both an em-dash and a hyphen. (For
| your example, a hyphen would be pretty normal style anyway.)
| But in a world where double quotes is a massively overloaded
| punctuation mark we probably don't need an en-dash at least.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| ...and when the discussion on whether to use [mnxyz+]-dashes
| has finally been sorted we can start on which font to use to
| render these dashes, whether they should be proportionally
| rendered, how to handle ligatures with dashes, to RGBA or not
| to RGBA dashes, hinted dashes versus unhinted dashes, the big
| difference between the visually identical dashes in language A
| versus language B, _et ce.te.ra._
| greggyb wrote:
| Of course, we do use compound numbers in English.
|
| A very common example is in threads for machined screw threads,
| e.g., 1/4-20. This is not a range of numbers spanning from 0.25
| to 20.0, but rather a pair of numbers that define two metrics
| of a single thing, which combine to uniquely identify the
| thread.
|
| Perhaps context is sufficient, but adding this to your examples
| gives us at least three scenarios where the single symbol would
| mean very different things with pairs of numbers: compounding,
| subtraction, and numerical ranges. If we add on the clause
| separation duties of the dashes mentioned in the article, we
| have four uses where a single symbol sits between two numbers
| and means entirely different things.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| There's no shortage of mathematical notation and delimiting
| characters. Eg you could write your machine screws as
| .25+20i. Obviously you raise e to the power of your screw and
| you get a rotation rate in the complex plane, and a width of
| screw in the complex plane as well.
|
| Compounding and numerical ops are basically never confused.
| Machine screw is the only one of these where its even
| plausible. Not that subtraction and range are ever ambiguous,
| but if they were just use "#1 - #n" to denote "the numbers
| 1/n being used as labels for some range of options, not as a
| numerical values".
|
| All in all, we have plenty of characters. A minimal set of
| rules, minimal set of characters, rich in predictable
| patterns, is what makes for a good language. The existence of
| a whole slew of specialized characters, all basically
| indistinguishable and frankly unheard of to most, has to work
| hard to justify itself right to live on my keyboard. We have
| parenthesis, commas, colons both full and partial, brackets
| square and curvy, braces, slashes forward and back...More
| than enough permutations and code space for anyone's
| expressive needs. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine
| characters with more rules on top is beyond my imagination.
| thfuran wrote:
| But apparently only insufferable pedants care about clarity.
| That's why we should stop using those pointless number glyphs
| too and just write them out in unary using hyphens.
| -/------------------------- is just fine.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| .... -.-- .--. .... . -. ... .- -. -.. .--. . .-. .. ---
| -.. .. ... .- .-.. .-.. .. -. . . -..
| dingbing wrote:
| > _pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over_
|
| The perfect topic for HN!
| [deleted]
| gnull wrote:
| Reminds me of this guy I met at a CTF. He decided that
| punctuation generally is unnecessary. What's the use of having
| so many different symbols if the only thing they denote is
| pauses between words.
|
| so when he wrote something . he used only periods to denote
| pauses . no other punctuation symbols . no capital letters .
| some people were thinking that his periods stand for perl
| concatenation operators . i dont know if he is still doing this
| . i hope he stopped
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Writing is a recorded symbolic convention for the benefit of
| the sufficiently educated reader.
|
| Eschewingallpunctuationforscriptocontinuaisofcourseppossiblet
| houghitishelltoread.Itisevendifficulttotypewithoutaddingthesp
| acesreflexivelyifindasipostthis.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua>
|
| There's a reason monks of old read aloud. It was about the
| only way to confirm the actual meaning of a text.
| c22 wrote:
| Ucnevndrpsmevwlsandstllmkesmthgrdblbutbrly.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| actually i kinda love that . punctuation is semi arbitrary
| anyway . and this is actually much easier to read than the
| usual literary english full of semicolons and dashes . mimics
| speech much better too .
| jameshart wrote:
| I think it mimics a certain kind of speech.
|
| Some people do talk like that . All complete thoughts .
| Sequential.
|
| Other people--and I very much count myself among them--have
| a less linear, more tree-like mode of expression; where the
| ideas, instead of building on what came before, are being
| laid out out of order - the ideas aren't completed - and
| more complex punctuation is needed to establish the
| relationships between those thoughts.
|
| It sounds like I'm saying the former is less sophisticated
| than the latter. I don't think that's true.
|
| I think we should probably try to express our ideas in a
| way that doesn't require out-of-sequence reasoning. Short,
| simple sentences. With clear meanings. Building on one
| another. Much easier to follow.
|
| The tree-like mode of endless nested parentheticals and
| asides is just a rendering of an incomplete thought
| process.
|
| Not better or more sophisticated. Just still in progress.
| trmsw wrote:
| Agreed! Plus with my handwriting, who's ever going to be able
| to tell the difference?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Handwriting? We don't do that here.
| golemotron wrote:
| Without the pedantry, things can devolve to violence. Panda
| bears with machine guns. Horrible stuff.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry.
|
| My takeaway wasn't that the article was being pedantic, just
| that it was being informative.
|
| What's the point of punctuation? The point is that ambiguity
| exists in human communication. Where accuracy and precision are
| important -- for example in formal communication -- different
| punctuation marks and rules help prevent misunderstandings.
|
| When engaged in less formal communication, or when the stakes
| of miscommunication are lower, these rules seem (as you
| observe) unnecessary. I think that insisting on proper syntax,
| spelling, grammar, or whatever else in an online forum like HN
| would be silly. But, internet forums aren't the entire world,
| and it is conceivable to me that there may be places where
| people need to depend on the meaning of their message being
| conveyed reliably.
| paulcole wrote:
| It reminds me of the strong feelings about Comic Sans.
|
| The guy who created it said something like, "If you love Comic
| Sans you don't know much about typography and should probably
| get a new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you don't know much
| about typography and should probably get a new hobby."
|
| I feel the same about this. The average person has about a
| billion things to improve in their writing before the "correct"
| use of different dashes should become something they think
| about.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| If you're using a compose key, the en- and em-dash are "--." and
| "---" respectively.
| layer8 wrote:
| Personally I use "2-" and "3-".
| Ennea wrote:
| "Do the first two look the same to you? It's because some devices
| display them inconsistently, when the characters sit all by
| themselves."
|
| And also because this article uses an en dash in the table in
| place of a hyphen.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I guess they respected their own recommendations: "when you're
| trying to illustrate what a hyphen looks like" was not one of
| the recommended uses of a hyphen!
|
| I should also note that this whole point seems at best a point
| for typography geeks. These are three almost identical marks
| that have very similar uses. I am completely convinced that _no
| one_ has ever disambiguated a phrase by noticing that something
| is a hyphen and not an en-dash or vice-versa.
| starkparker wrote:
| Interestingly, if I copy that first character in the table
| early enough in the page load, it's a hyphen. If I copy it
| later, it's an en dash. Considering that this article is from
| 2010, I assume there's some JS added in the last 12 or so years
| that's autoconverting it.
|
| EDIT: Wayback confirms it's supposed to be a hyphen:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120120121527/http://www.punctu...
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| It's the server (probably WordPress's fault), not JS. –
| is an en dash: $ curl -s
| https://www.punctuationmatters.com/en-dash-em-dash-hyphen/ |
| grep -A6 '<h3>What' <h3>What do they look like?</h3>
| <table style="height: 139px;" width="289"> <tbody>
| <tr> <td><strong> –</strong></td>
| <td><strong> hyphen </strong></td> </tr>
| jotaen wrote:
| > Some people prefer the way a "space-en-dash-space" looks.
|
| I think this isn't just a matter of personal preference, but it's
| also largely a cultural thing - in German, for example, the
| "space-en-dash-space" form is common.
|
| This is true for a lot of other punctuation as well. For
| instance, in Germany, we quote ,,like this" instead of "like
| this". Whereas in Switzerland or France, it's common to quote
| using Guillemets, as in <<Hello there!>>. This style can also be
| found in German texts, though it's less common than quotation
| marks, and it would typically be used >>inversely<<.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Using an en-dash like this - you see - is the usual British
| style.
|
| The unspaced em-dashes--like this--is typically American.
| euroderf wrote:
| Unspaced em & en dashes tend to stay glued to the surrounding
| words when there should instead be "word" wrapping at one end
| or the other of the dash. It is a crime against text
| aesthetics. We have met the criminals, and they is us -
| software types.
|
| Not to mention, ems and ens are not Ascii and thus not
| strictly kosher.
| laserlight wrote:
| I consider a crime not to have any spaces between em-dashes
| and adjacent words. Traditionally, I guess, there were spaces
| of different sizes. Hair-thin spaces were typeset before and
| after em-dashes --- that's what I do in LaTeX using (\,).
| But, because different sized spaces have never been a thing
| on the Web, let alone plain text, people have preferred to
| not use any spaces, for some reason.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| This is precisely what I do religiously in my latex:
| M-dashes are always {\,---\,}
| FabHK wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a crime, but a convention. In Europe
| it's an n-dash with surrounding spaces, in the US is an
| m-dash without spaces. For me, the former is nicer, but
| crimes are maybe a tad more serious.
| Symbiote wrote:
| HN normalizes thin and hair spaces to normal spaces, so
| they can't be demonstrated here, but there is an example on
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_charact
| er#Hair_spac...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Oh dang the hair spaces look perfect.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I think Medium uses hairspaces. And of course there's some
| automation since all writers seem to get that thing.
|
| There ends my trivia about that unusable site.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I'm sure that's a ton of fun for anyone trying to write a
| natural language parser. LMAO using the end brackets as start
| brackets and vice versa.
| groestl wrote:
| > trying to write a natural language parser.
|
| I assume we're done doing that, that task is finished ;)
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I get you mean chatGPT has solved the problem, but it feels
| as if its solved the problem without answering the deep
| questions. We still don't really get how the brain does it
| or the answer to any of the deep linguistic questions,
| instead we get two systems capable of language which no one
| understands. But at least its useful! So maybe there are
| natural language parsers yet to be written, for nothing
| else than to finally test our understanding of natural
| language parsing.
| nor-and-or-not wrote:
| Actually we quote ,,like this".
| nor-and-or-not wrote:
| Oh, you quoted correctly, but the display of the right quotes
| is messed up. They should go from upper left bottom to upper
| right top, but instead show as upper left top to upper right
| bottom.
| jotaen wrote:
| Yeah, so we could conclude that punctuation is not just a
| cultural thing, but - to make matters worse - depend on the
| whims of the font maker as well.
| Symbiote wrote:
| No, both " and " characters exist, as well as ".
|
| "Convex" or ,,concave" usage varies by language. See http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table
| jotaen wrote:
| To clarify, I was referring to the mere technical fact
| that only if you type in a character like `"` (U+201C,
| "Left Double Quotation Mark") using one font, it isn't
| guaranteed to be rendered in the exact same style in a
| different font.
|
| E.g., when I type a comment on HN and enter said `"` in
| the input text field, it uses my system's default
| monospace font (Courier), which renders the character so
| that the stroke appears to go from bottom left (thick) to
| top right (thin). After I submit my comment, HN uses
| Verdana (the one from my system), which renders the very
| same character so that the stroke appears to go from the
| top left (thick) to the bottom right (thin). It's the
| same Unicode character, but both fonts happen to render
| them differently according to how the font maker laid out
| and mapped the respective characters. (I can observe the
| same behaviour when I compare both fonts in my word
| processor, so it's not HN-specific.)
| kps wrote:
| "" look like 66 99 in conventional serif text fonts, but
| have wide variation in sans-serif and decorative fonts
| where they often resemble ``'' _or_ ''`` .
|
| ,," are more consistent in current computer fonts by
| virtue of their Unicode names strongly suggesting a
| particular appearance. " U+201C LEFT
| DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK " U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE
| QUOTATION MARK ,, U+201E DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION
| MARK " U+201F DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION
| MARK `` U+301D REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION
| MARK '' U+301E DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There are many other quote styles - my language uses ,,these
| signs" (which we call "ghilimele", similarly to French
| "guillaumets").
|
| EDIT: Seems HN is eating up the right signs... You can see
| them on Wikipedia here, they essentially look like two small
| commas: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghilimele
| glandium wrote:
| Since you're quoting France, it's worth noting that there,
| double punctuations (?:!;) are preceded by a half-space
| (although in practice it's always a full space). Likewise,
| guillemets are surrounded by spaces (the space inside the
| guillemets might be a half-space, I'm not entirely sure). So it
| would be << Hello there ! >>
| FabHK wrote:
| Easy way to identify francophone writers. They always have a
| space in front of their colons, exclamation marks, etc.
| groestl wrote:
| Ahhhhh, thanks for that! I'm German speaking, and I must
| admit I questioned the intellectual capacity of some people
| I conversed with, due to that. In German there is even a
| slur for it: "Deppenleerzeichen" (fool's whitespace). Now
| that clears things up.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I never heard about the "Deppen Leerzeichen" in the
| context of punctuation, but always when German texts
| split up compound words with a space for no reason.
| groestl wrote:
| I think that's the central meaning, but it's used for
| space before punctuation as well (just a random reference
| https://www.lass-andere-
| schreiben.de/blog/kategorie/schreibe...)
| layer8 wrote:
| That's normally called
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken.
| FabHK wrote:
| Just a convention. I used to snigger at the English
| language convention of capitalising the next sentence in
| a letter/email after the address - after all, you're
| still in the same sentence, so why capitalise it. But,
| it's a conventional thing, so now I do it myself.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| That says more about you, frankly.
|
| Eastern Europeans often drop articles because that's
| (apparently) what they do in some Slavic languages.
| That's a minor second/third-language quirk, not about an
| intellectual _deficiency_ (lack of capacity).
|
| Of course, some extra whitespace is even more harmless.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I think most people have these biases in one form or
| another. It's mostly a matter of your experiences I've
| found. Rural dialects especially trip me up. I don't know
| a lot of them personally, and most of the ones I see on
| TV are talking about.. rural stuff. Also, I think a lot
| of rural people who go to universities naturally end up
| toning down their dialects because they tend to be in the
| minority. So it's kind of rarer to see an academic with a
| thick southern accent. It will often be less pronounced.
| On the other hand Eastern European English accents have
| the opposite effect because most of the Eastern Europeans
| I've seen speak at length are chess grandmasters and
| physicists.
|
| The only thing we can really do is try to notice these
| biases in ourselves and ignore them as best we can.
| nephanth wrote:
| An unbreakable half-space, to be pedantic (though in this
| case the pedantry makes sense: you don't want your
| punctuation mark to end up on the next line)
| glandium wrote:
| And for extra fun, while the French word for space (espace)
| is masculine gender (un espace) for most its meanings, in
| typography, it's feminine (une espace).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And BTW, all of these can be found on the new AZERTY keyboard :
|
| https://norme-azerty.fr/en/
|
| (BEPO version also exists)
| kps wrote:
| That looks well thought out. I use a QWERTY layout with
| similar reasoning applied to the Option/AltGr levels (but
| entirely different in specific placements) and I routinely
| type various dashes and quotes without conscious thought, any
| more than I consciously think about Shift-level punctuation.
| otherme123 wrote:
| In Spain the RAE (equivalent to the Oxford Dictionary)
| recomends <<this>>, but you will almost never find it except in
| professional printing. They are not in the keyboard, so
| everybody uses "this".
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's a shame when technology fails us in this way - I just
| mean that computers are created to be our tools, and if we
| want to easily write <<this>>, we can make that happen. If we
| only have people with this mindset (computers are _our_
| tools) in the right places.
| arp242 wrote:
| > in Germany, we quote ,,like this" instead of "like this"
|
| This is also the traditional style in Dutch; it's what I was
| taught at school. These days many just use "upper quotes". You
| can still find the traditional style in books and some
| newspapers, but others have switched over the years.
|
| In traditional Ethiopian you would use as a word separator,
| and . as a full stop. Over time, people have started to "just"
| use the space as a word separator. There's some Wikipedia pages
| that mix both styles; for example on [1] you can see being
| used for the first three paragraphs and then it switches to a
| space. I rather like being able to see the evolution of
| language/typography on a single page.
|
| [1]:
| https://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8A%A0%E1%88%9B%E1%88%AD%E1...
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Interesting. I also see a few periods and a lot of colons
| with a line over them.
|
| What do they mean? Just curious.
| arp242 wrote:
| Comma, question mark, stuff like that. There's an overview
| at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic#Punctuation
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Thanks. I wasn't aware of this type of script either; I
| like it. Sort of a "missing link"(of course there is no
| historical relationship) between Kana in Japanese and
| Hangul in Korean.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In an era when "they" can be a singular reference, worrying about
| the typography of various dashes seems like a pointless concern.
| Whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash is used has far less impact
| on clarity than pronoun-antecedent disagreement.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't see the link "they" and dashes. This seems like two
| completely separate matters / whataboutism.
| kanbara wrote:
| the singular they with singular _agreeing_ antecedent has been
| in use since the 14th C.
| https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=they
|
| and the modern hyphen that sits on the same line as the text is
| from... Gutenberg. 1455. 15th C.
|
| maybe after almost 700 years we can stop complaining that non-
| binary and trans people are ruining language, and start
| accepting that they can be singular and plural. and that it has
| uses to refer to persons of unknown gender or as a standin for
| a known gender. it's pretty common and is not going to change
| because you don't like it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not according to all the grammar I ever learned. It's not a
| trans/gender thing. It's lazy and unclear writing. It would
| be much better to have declared a new singular gender neutral
| pronoun than having to disambiguate "they" every time it is
| used.
| taeric wrote:
| It isn't that punctuation doesn't matter; however, non phoneme
| based typographical elements are really hard to defend. Worse,
| characters that are not present on the vast majority of input
| mechanisms? Really? This is the line people are going to draw in
| the hopes of not dying?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-12 23:00 UTC)